A secure element is a smart object that is intended to communicate with its environment. In particular, the secure element may cooperate with a terminal. A terminal may be a User Equipment such as a mobile phone or a PDA (personal digital assistant) or another mobile device.
Over the past years “contactless”, or near field communications (NFC), has quickly gained popularity and many contactless services are now commercially deployed. Public transport schemes all over the world use contactless systems and contactless payments look set to follow. NFC typically uses a smart card in “credit card” form factor. Other smart card formats are available: of particular interest in the mobile telecommunications is the ubiquitous UICC (Universal Integrated Circuit Card) often referred to as the SIM card (Subscriber Identity Module card).
A much-discussed extension to NFC is to replace the “credit card” form factor card used in existing contactless services by a mobile phone handset containing a Secure Element such as the SIM card.
Mobile NFC takes advantage of the fact that users typically already carry a mobile phone handset and consider mobiles as personal and trusted. In one mobile handset, a user could, in principle, replace numerous physical “contactless” cards.
A cornerstone of the Mobile NFC is that all security and NFC functionality is controlled by the Secure Element. In this regard, it is noted that the SIM is the widest available deployed portable and standardized security element with more than 2 billion users worldwide. It is therefore highly desirable to use the existing SIM platform rather than to introduce a new secure element to the phone. Furthermore, the SIM is removable and users can maintain their applications and data from one NFC enabled mobile device to another. However, according to the present invention, other solutions of a secure element are possible besides the SIM card.
The use of NFC requires communication protocols between applications hosted by the secure element and applications hosted outside of the secure element, typically hosted by a terminal. Typically, different applications using NFC functionality require different user interfaces or at least comprise proprietary elements in the definition of the interface of the application. Furthermore, each service application that aims at exposing a user interface needs to deploy its own user interface for all the possible terminal platforms it wishes to cover. Therefore, users can have a very different experience that can be dependent on the service provider and/or on the user interface logic. In case a user wants to swap the secure element (e.g. the SIM card), it is possible that the user interface part of the terminal potentially does not match the environment of the secure element. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide standardized communication protocols, especially a common language, for data exchange between the secure element and the terminal.